Because I Can't
by HoVis
Summary: Had she been any other member of his people, she would have been dead the very moment she even thought of betraying him. Ben reflects on his daughter's betrayal and all the things he cannot do. Please R and R!


**A/N:** Hi everybody, this is my first attempts at a LOST story, a little one-shot just to see how it goes...! I hope it's alright. Just to explain: I've been watching the deleted scenes from Seasom 3 (available on YouTube if anyone is interested, though I imagine that most hardcore fans will have access to the DVDs by now in preparation for the next series!), and two of them - "Alex and Daddy" and "On the way to Jacob's Place" - really emphasised for me what I see as one of the most interesting relationships within the show, that between Alex and her 'father'. Does he care for her? I would wager yes... but then again I don't think Ben thinks in the same way that most people do. For that exact reason, I very much enjoyed getting into his brain - what a fascinating character! All kudos, therefore, goes to the writers, cast, and creators of LOST for providing everyone with such juicy food for thought as this series has... anyway, I hope you like my take on this. Be warned, however: this isn't a very "fluffy" father-daughter fic, but I hope it sums up what we have seen onscreen so far.

**Disclaimer:** I don't own LOST, though I would love to be a fly-on-the-wall of one of their writers' sessions...!

**Tagline:** Had she been any other member of his people, she would have been dead the very moment she even thought of betraying him. Ben reflects on his daughter's betrayal and all the things he cannot do.

**Because I Can't**

Oddly, the fact that she had betrayed him did not seem to sting so much as the fact that in her mind she had not betrayed the "Daddy" who had loved her in her younger years but Ben, a man whom – as far as she was concerned – she wanted dead. But the fact that there were no other children on the island meant that he was woefully lacking in advice on what to do with a daughter who had caused the deaths of seven of his people, for there were no parents either.

He himself had never gone through the supposed inevitable teenage phase of rebellion – unless you counted gassing forty people at the age of twenty-one, when he was no longer a teenager anyway – preferring instead to patiently bide his time tending to his drunken father until the time came for him to inherit his majority, the island. He had been more than patient with Alex, too, but the moment he saw her stand opposite the French scientist, their faces mirroring one another's over a chasm of sixteen years, he knew full well that _that_ bridge was burnt. (He had not remained leader for so long without possessing some small does of pragmatism). As he had promised, he had returned Alex to her new family – or perhaps her old one. He was done being patient, or perhaps he had reached a new level of patience.

Had she been any other one of his people she would have been killed before she could even have started to think of betraying him. When the child had fallen into his lap – John Locke called it kidnap, he called it social service – he had taken her as his own, partially out of a perverse curiosity to discover whether he could do any better than his father had done. He saw her as an intellectual experiment (the others, anyway, had been on the island so long they could scarcely remember _being_ children, let alone know how to bring one up), but was more than a little surprised to find that his human sympathy (which had not even twitched upon seeing the people who had made up the landscape of his childhood lying on the ground, dead essentially by his own hand) was aroused by the beguiling creature with the dark eyes that, even at an early age, hinted at the fiery spirit of the soul trapped within.

As she grew older, he began to educate her, in science, math, history – in the truth of the island on which she had been born. The schooling for which his father had brought him to the island and so eventually died seemed to pay off as he passed this knowledge onto the (_his_) child. Tom proved an excellent godfather, immersing himself in the more menial aspects of raising a child (Ben was fascinated by his girl, but somehow not enough so to educate himself in the ways of changing a diaper) with great enthusiasm whilst he got down to the nitty-gritty of tempering the girl's mind. He found her remarkably unyielding, however, and when she started to talk Ben realised she was the only person who ever said "no" to him anymore. Somehow, this insistent repetition of this single stubborn syllable seemed to matter little when compared with her rare but somehow beatific use of another word – "Daddy". It was around this time that Ben also realised she was the only thing in which he took any real pleasure in, for everything else – his plans, his daily manipulations of his people's thoughts and ideas – had something he knew to be rotten at the core of him, just as his life itself was corroded by having been born with a death. It became something of a subject of amusement among his people that he would frequently, in the midst of meetings or discussions mention Alex and her latest achievement, be it learning to walk, joined-up handwriting or even (to her severe embarrassment as she grew older) having her first period. And, despite the weakness which Ben knew this revealed, he did not desist in sharing her growth with all of them, for it had been a long time since any of them had experienced anything _new_, and he was constantly aware of the danger of a bored group of people turning their thoughts to rebellion. Until the plane fell from the sky (not long after the sky had fell out of his world with the revelation that he was ever-more mortal) and gave them all a new project on which to vent their energies, it seemed a fair enough compromise to give his daughter as an object of interest to the entire community. He watched with some curiosity as they spoilt her shamelessly, something which he did not indulge in, for _he_ had never been spoilt, and he was unaware that it had done him any harm.

In fact, he had never been a particularly sentimental parent – overt physical contact had always seemed somewhat distasteful to him, and their shared disposition to not wasting words (perhaps he gave himself too little credit – that she had surely got from him) – but they had both carried on fairly well together until she hit puberty, and then noticed what had until then been merely an annoyance to her – the male sex. In particular, Carl.

She was never in love with Carl, he was sure of that (he had never been in love, anyway, and he was sure he could never bring up a child to do something he himself could not do) but he represented a new start at a time in her life when she was beginning to answer certain questions to which she was getting the wrong answers. A small part of him wondered if perhaps – considering the by-now poor (though, considering she was currently helping her maniac of a _mother_ to tie him up, 'poor' might be something of an understatement) state of their relationship – whether she was glad to know that she had no genetic ties to him after all. Since he knew, however, that she had at least two knives in her bag, he decided not to ask. Perhaps, since she claimed she wished him dead, she would have no scruples in cutting his throat now that she knew he was but her own adopted father. (He extended her the credit of assuming that she thought the way he did, and he had gassed his own father, blood ties or no).

He could have had her killed. Or, rather, he _should_ have. But, just as he could not allow the survivors of flight 815 to leave _his_ island, nor could he punish the guileless, rebellious teenager who had been his daughter with anything more than a banishment which she probably welcomed. He could not kill her, because the eyes and the spirit which had provided him with the only match of his adult life were still there, even if they looked at him with undisguised disgust rather than undying (clearly, not quite undying) adoration now.

He should have had her killed the moment he began to love her, for that was the moment when real betrayal had become possibly. But he hadn't, because he couldn't. And because, even if he hadn't been a very good father, at least he had never forgotten her birthday.

888

**A/N**: So, what did everyone think? PLEASE leave a review and tell me!


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